NEW DELHI // If Priya Rajan were to relocate from New York back home to India, the only place she could move is New Delhi, where her marketing firm has a branch office.
But much as Ms Rajan wishes to return, New Delhi gives her pause.
“I’ve heard too much now about how unsafe that city is for women,” she said. “I’m not sure I could live there and move about with any type of freedom at all.”
Tomorrow will mark a year since a young woman was raped aboard a moving bus by six men. The victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, died of her injuries, sparking massive street protests and forcing New Delhi as well as India to face up to the frequency with which sexual crimes are committed.
“Not a day passes when we don’t shed tears,” the victim’s father said in a recent interview. “Our tears are not for her death, but for what she suffered. We just can’t forget how she suffered at the hands of these men.”
New laws were passed after the attack and the media began to swarm over every reported incident of rape, and for the first tine Indians were openly talking about sexual violence against women.
“I know people are talking about it more now,” Ms Rajan said from New York. “But I have no idea if it’s any safer, because of all this discussion. I wouldn’t think so. It has only been a year.”
The rape and murder of the young student – called “Nirbhaya,” or “fearless” in the media because Indian law prohibits naming rape victims – moved rapidly through the courts, driven perhaps by popular anger.
In September, a court sentenced four of the six defendants to death, with the judge noting that their crime had “shocked the collective conscience” of the country. Another member of the gang had hanged himself in prison. The sixth, a juvenile at the time of the assault, is serving three years in a reform home.
The case was tried in one of the six “fast-track” courts that had been set up in Delhi in January, just days after Nirbhaya’s death, to expedite cases involving sexual crimes against women.
In less than a month, the courts were flooded with 500 rape cases that had become mired in the justice system.
In March, parliament passed a law to deal more stringently with sexual crimes against women. The law expanded the definition of rape to include a broader notion of sexual assault, and set tougher penalties for stalking, sexual harassment and voyeurism.
The spotlight on sexual crimes may also have emboldened more women to report them. In India, victims of rape or sexual harassment are often stigmatised and have aspersions cast on their character, so women have felt uncomfortable reporting them.
According to government statistics, 1,330 rapes were reported in Delhi and its suburbs between January and October this year, compared with 706 in 2012.
Two more recent rape cases have also received national media coverage. In August, a young journalist was gang raped by five men in a Mumbai suburb. Last month, another young journalist, who worked for the investigative news magazine Tehelka, accused her editor, Tarun Tejpal, of sexual assault in a hotel lift on two occasions during a conference in Goa.
Women coming forward to report attacks represents a welcome change, said Nilanjana Roy, a campaigner and writer on women’s rights.
“It was imperative for women and men to be able to report crimes of sexual violence and to talk about them with greater ease and less shame,” Ms Roy said. “That’s happened, and that’s a big, important change.”
But beyond this, she said, not much has changed.
“It was also necessary to see much more freedom of movement, for women across all classes, across workplaces and in public spaces,” Ms Roy said. “That just hasn’t changed enough.”
Ms Roy also pointed out that the government’s response systems – “the legal and policing systems that handle crimes of sexual violence: the courts, police stations, hospitals” – have been resistant or indifferent to the need for sensitivity and promptness.
Satyajit Sarna, a New Delhi-based lawyer, pointed out that, for instance, despite a supreme court order to police stations to register all reports of crimes, “any citizen will tell you that it’s really pretty much up to the officer on duty as to whether he registers the case or not”.
Similarly, despite a statute prohibiting courts from “taking cognisance of facts relating to a victim’s sexual history”, defence lawyers inevitably brought these facts up in trials, Mr Sarna said.
Rape trials, even in the fast-track courts, continue to stretch over inordinate lengths of time, he said.
“There’s still a lot to be done,” Ms Roy said. “We have a long, long way to go, despite a year’s worth of steady effort by activists and others.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae
